7 More Things About the New American Center

Over the past ten days, millions of Americans have read the Esquire/NBC News feature, "The New American Center," and some have written to us (or blogged or tweeted about the feature) asking some very good questions. Just as the feature lists 13 things that the New American Center is, does, or believes, we thought it might be helpful (with some assistance from Daniel Franklin of the Benenson Strategy Group, who helped create and analyze the survey) to list a few things the New American Center is not.

1. The Center is Not A Monolithic Bloc of Voters, Much Less an Inchoate Political Party, That Can Be Moved En Masse.

It is simply a large group of Americans who are less inherently partisan than even their own self-identified political identity would indicate.

2. The Center Is Not New.

There have always been people who've fallen between the cracks of the traditional left-right divide, and there have always been people who've had to reconcile their own messy slate of beliefs with any given candidate. Thus it's ever been in these United States, so the mere existence of the Center was not what we found surprising. "The finding that was the most striking [from the survey]," says Franklin, "was the size of the Center. It's a majority, with more than fifty percent of Americans refusing to view politics and policy through a strict partisan or ideological lens. They do care strongly about certain things, but those things don't fit neatly into the category of left or right."

3. The Center is Not a Political Designation—It's Part of The Ideological Spectrum.

As Mark Warren writes in his accompanying essay, "What we mean when we talk about the Center [is this]: what most Americans actually believe." We set out to discover what ideological affiliations like liberal and conservative mean at a time when the twenty-first century is pulling the country in different directions. You've got wholesale, once-in-a-generation changes in how a lot people are thinking about fundamentals like debt and marriage and privacy, and those shifts have warped the foundations of both mainstream and fringe belief. That was our thinking, anyway, and so we wanted to ask as many Americans as we could what they actually believe, and working with some pollsters who do this kind of thing at the very highest levels (and who do so for opposing teams, the better to ensure balance), we did our best to find out what beliefs constitute the middle of today's ideological spectrum.

4. The Center Is Not A Mess of Arbitrary Groupings.

"Some people responded to the survey as though it's some kind of dinner party and we only got to invite the people that we wanted," says Franklin. "Actually: this is how the data, with 2400 people responding to over a hundred questions (most of which had seven or nine different possible answers), worked out. To classify and categorize different things is admittedly a bit of an art form, and we tried many different variations—six and seven and eight and nine segments. There were probably 20 or 30 or 40 different solutions that we left out, and this is the one that made the most sense. It's not to say that it is the only way that you can, but for Neil [Newhouse] and us, this was what worked best."

Some readers have written to Esquire asking why we chose to include some segments—like our Minivan Moderates— in the Center rather than on the left. "That's an important question and one that we wrestled over. The main argument for including the Minivan Moderates on the left is that they voted for the president two to one. But the main argument against is that, when we asked point-blank whether the government is doing too much or too little, they are slightly more conservative than the rest of the country. They are also slightly more conservative than the left on questions of choice. More conservative when it comes to the balanced budget amendment. More conservative when it comes to things like disability and affirmative action. We agreed that, under different circumstances, with different candidates and a different issue set, these voters could vote just as strongly for Republicans as they did for a Democrat. That's why they're part of the Center."

5. The Center Is Not Always Consistent.

"One professor wrote and said, basically, 'If you look at the Democrats and Republicans within these segments, you'll find that they're just as deeply divided as Democrats and Republicans overall.' But he's looking at it as though self-identification—what people think they are based on possibly outdated definitions—matters most of all. But guess what? He's wrong. In fact, the self-identified Democrats and Republicans in each of these segments, while they are different from each other, just like old and young people in each segment are different from each other, they are still more similar to one another than they are to self-identified Republicans or Democrats on the left or the right." These inconsistencies don't undermine the segmentation—they merely show that in the Center, as on the left and right, there can sometimes be conflicting, or seemingly conflicting, ideas.

6. The Center is Not Not Diverse.

Yes, it's pretty white (as is every segment across the ideological spectrum save for one, The Gospel Left), but non-Caucasians are, in fact, present in large numbers throughout the Center. The second highest percentage of African Americans in any segment appears in the Center segment we deemed "TheWhateverman," and the percentage of Latinos and Asian Americans in three of the four Center segments is as high, if not higher, than on the left or right. Some have argued that assigning the majority of African-Americans to the left (in the Gospel Left) was misguided because their relatively conservative religious views should land them in the Center, but this, alas, is wishful thinking. The voters who make up the Gospel Left voted for President Obama 99-1 last year, and the top three issues they feel most passionately about are raising taxes on millionaires; increasing minimum wage; and paid sick and maternity leave. As Franklin puts it, "There is a reason that a Democrat running for office spends every Sunday going to black churches. They are the base."

7. The Center Is Not Inconsequential

Many readers told us that our feature was a fun read, but since the country is locked in a two-party system, it doesn't really matter what the Center wants. On a federal level, for the time being, this might be true, but on a local level, the results of the data show how legislators can pick off centrist support for a wide range of issues.

Those twenty-week abortion bans that have been popping up across the country? There is a huge drop in support among the Center for abortions performed after the first trimester, so in addition to the reliable pro-life base, anti-abortion proponents are hoping to leverage the Center to their advantage.

(Ditto the voter ID laws in Virginia, Arizona, and other states—there is huge support among the Center for requiring voters to present an ID at the polls.)

It turns out that issues that many would traditionally equate with the left-- background checks for guns; gay marriage; abortion rights—are, in fact, Centrist positions. Similarly, issues that would be widely considered conservative—wariness with government spending and regulation; domestic oil and gas exploration; voter ID laws—are Centrist positions, too.

We need to keep such things in mind when we talk about politics, politicians, and the elections up ahead. The Center has a funny way of moving with the times. Best keep an eye on it, the better to understand what exactly what we're talking about when we talk about America.

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